GB has something for everyone! I want to thank Billie Bob for the link re dual booting, which helped to answer my question and to thank Robert for the System Build link, which was very educational, and I'd have to commend Corsair (and the writer) for doing a great job. (But it was a painfully slow d/l with dial-up;-)

Robert, I want to build my own someday. Excellent link - I bookmarked it. I'm still a little intimidated by the over-clocking though! My step-son and I are talking about building one for the grand-son. Yeah, I know. Grandmas aren't supposed to be into this stuff.

Jersey doc, a hearty welcome to Gameboomers! I have what I consider to be the ideal setup for me. I kept my old 98SE computer (reformatted and reinstalled the 98SE OS for a brand new start with that one). My new(er) computer is an hp that I simply love. It has a P4 processor with hyper-threading at 3.0 GHtz; I upgraded to 1 G of RAM; a decent 128 MB Raedon Sapphire video card; 160 G hard drive etc. It's already outdated, but I can do everything I want with it. What I did to make this system work for me was to put in a wireless network and then use a KVM (keyboard, video, mouse) switch which allows me to double tap my Scroll Lock key and switch between the two computers using the same monitor, keyboard and mouse. I'm playin Grim Fandango right now on the old computer (which wouldn't even load on my XP computer). If I need to touch base with a walkthrough, I just switch to my XP or vice versa if I'm playing on my XP. I love the set-up.

As far as a new one goes, do a lot of research. There have been a couple of great threads lately on GB addressing the same question. You've already gotten the best advice - get something you can upgrade. Avoid the ones with integrated graphics etc. I'm not a huge fan of Dells, but many people love them. The issues I have with Dells or hps like I have is they put a huge amount of things on them that I don't want. Then I have to go in and uninstall, delete, edit the registry etc. But stick around. I'm sure you'll get plenty of good advice here!

From what I read near the end of the article , over-clocking the processor is pretty straight forward . They over-clocked their processor and got another 200MHZ out of it , essentially changing it from a 2.2 GB to a 2.4 GB .

They didn't get into over-clocking the video cards , however , most Nvidia cards that you buy come slightly over-clocked out of the box ( some more than others ) . I think the EVGA brand is the best to get .

I would suggest (having built several PCs for myself & others) that overclocking is an entirely separate issue and you need not concern yourself with it until you're completely confident fiddling with hardware and bios settings.

And anyway, in my experience, the gains available through overclocking are insignificant in the real world, rather than the megahertz obsessed world of the weenie overclockers

Hello Robert -- I'm sure gremlin was having a bit of a laugh at himself as a self-confessed hardware geek.

I always thought "weenies" were college students who studied very hard. The best way to shake the label was to do jumping jacks on the library table if you were caught studying there on a Saturday night.

I myself am within a day or two of ordering a new Dell. I have one last decision -- how much money should I plug into purchasing the video card?

You could get the one with the single 256MB 7800GTX , and tell them you want the SLI motherboard , and a 500W PSU . That way , you could add another video card later if you think you need it . There aren't very many games out there at the moment that will really benefit from the SLI setup all that much , but I'm sure they're coming .

I think it may be time to move this thread into the Glitches forum, where we may get additional feedback from the experts, overclockers, and other kinds of hardware geeks that hang out there. So I'm copying the thread over there to Glitches.

Another alternative to building your own system is to have it built by a local computer shop. You would be likely to get support from the person who built it. The only drawback to building your own system is the fact that each component has its own warranty not the whole system. Also, MS is releasing a new OS this year. You may want to keep thqat fact in mind when picking out components. Kay